The Construction of a Manifesto: Erich Mendelsohn

A Double Manifesto of Modernity

Abstract

This article examines the correspondence exchanged between Erich and Luise Mendelsohn during the architect’s 1924 journey to America in order to reconsider the intellectual genesis of Amerika: Bilderbuch eines Architekten (1926). In contrast to traditional interpretations, which have presented the book as an immediate response to the North American metropolis and emphasized the influence of figures such as Fritz Lang, the letters reveal the journey as a gradual process of observation, reflection, and critical elaboration.

The analysis demonstrates that several of the key categories later employed by Mendelsohn to interpret New York—dynamism, space, organization, and verticality—were already being formulated during the Atlantic crossing aboard the Deutschland, before his arrival in Manhattan. The correspondence also highlights Luise Mendelsohn’s role as a constant intellectual interlocutor and allows for a reassessment of the central position attributed by historiography to Fritz Lang in shaping Mendelsohn’s American experience.

The letters further document the evolution of Mendelsohn’s interpretation of the United States: from an initial fascination with its technological and industrial power to a more complex reflection on the relationships between technology, culture, economics, and urban form. This transformation culminated in the redefinition of the journey as a Studienfahrt, conceived as a critical investigation into the conditions of contemporary modernity.

Drawing on this documentary evidence, the article proposes an interpretation of Amerika not as an autonomous work, nor merely as a photographic book, but as the first formulation of a broader intellectual project whose continuation can be identified in Russland / Europa / Amerika (1929), understood as a comparative and international elaboration of the issues first raised during the American journey.